The 2024 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, with a monetary award of 11 million Swedish kronor (approximately €950,000), was awarded to three scientists: David Baker of the University of Washington received one half of the prize “for computational protein design”; while Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, both from Google DeepMind in London, UK, jointly received the other half “for protein structure prediction.”

The Nobel Prize web site says: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 is about proteins, life’s ingenious chemical tools. David Baker has succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have developed an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures. These discoveries hold enormous potential.

The three winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

Hassabis was a chess prodigy with a 2300 rating at the age of 13, just 35 Elo behind Judit Polgar. He was also an accomplished player in games, and at the age of 17 he programmed the bestselling game Theme Park. He founded DeepMind Technologies in London, which was acquired by Google for around $400 million in 2014. DeepMind developed AlphaGo, which achieved world class strength in Go, and AlphaZero, which did the same for chess. That was followed by AlphaFold, which revolutionized protein structure prediction. This breakthrough AI program allowed the two AI researchers to predict the structure of all known single proteins. AlphaFold facilitates the simulation of protein interactions, paving the way for the design of biologics, heralding a new era in therapeutic development.